An invoice hits AP. It’s forwarded to a budget owner, then to a project lead, then answered in a new thread with a side chat for “context.” Somewhere in that chain, the invoice stops moving. A month later a supplier calls, your aging report is up, and you’re reconstructing who approved what and which PDF was final. It looks like a process. It behaves like guesswork.
This isn’t a debate about tools. It’s a question of control, timing, and a clean approval trail that holds up during month-end close and audit. When the path to “yes” lives in scattered emails, people work harder while the business still waits.
Email feels collaborative because everyone can jump in, yet it quietly creates forks that no one can see end to end. By the time AP is ready to pay, there may be multiple versions of the invoice, a few subject lines, and at least one “looks good” from someone without authority. What should be a clear decision turns into a detective story.
Benchmarks tell the same story at scale. Ardent Partners puts the average processing time at 9.2 days with an all-in cost of $9.40 per invoice, while best-in-class teams land about 3.1 days at $2.78 because routing and visibility live in an approval workflow rather than improvised in inboxes. The more work you push into informal handoffs, the more that gap widens.
That gap is even harder to ignore now. Attention is the scarce resource. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reports the average worker now receives 117 emails a day, most skimmed in under a minute, with more sent to large distribution lists. That’s how an approval request gets buried between a newsletter and a vendor update without anyone meaning to miss it.
The downstream impact shows up at month-end close. CFO.com notes that half of finance teams still take more than a week to close, often due to fragmented workflows and unclear status. If approvals live in threads, the team is guessing what to accrue, which adds stress and erodes confidence in the numbers.
There’s a compliance angle too. In 2024, the SEC announced $390 million in penalties tied to off-channel electronic communications and missing records. You may not be in capital markets, but the lesson still applies: when business decisions happen outside your system of record, you’re carrying avoidable risk.
And fraud risk keeps rising. The 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey found 79% of organizations were targeted by payments-fraud attempts in 2024, and 63% cited business email compromise as the top vector. When approvals travel by plain email, they expand the very surface criminals try to exploit.
Numbers tell one part of the story. The day-to-day reality inside AP makes it even clearer.
Imagine a typical month. The first two weeks move smoothly. Approvals mostly land, and questions are easy to answer. Then calendars fill, travel starts, and small frictions pile up. A budget owner glances at an approval on their phone and plans to revisit it later. A project lead forwards a question to a teammate in a fresh thread. A director replies from a personal account with a quick “looks good.”
By the last three days of the month, Treasury is watching cash, procurement is closing POs, and AP is trying to decide what’s ready to pay. The invoice that seemed approved now has two versions and no clean record of authority. The safest choice is to hold it. A supplier calls. A discount slips. The month-end close window tightens. No one did anything wrong, yet the process still failed.
That’s the trap. Email gives everyone a voice and no one a view. It spreads the work while hiding the decision.
Teams defend inbox approvals because they feel fast and familiar. People already live in email, can forward from a phone, and don’t want one more place to check. The trouble is that speed without lineage isn’t speed at all. A five-second forward turns into thirty minutes of chasing for AP and an hour of reconstruction for controllers. Multiply that hidden tax by your monthly volume and it’s obvious where the day went.
There’s also a trust issue. When approvers can’t see coding, match status, or policy thresholds at decision time, they hesitate or send questions into a separate thread. Momentum stalls. The cost isn’t just time; it’s predictability, which is exactly what cash planning and the close depend on.
Those are the pressure points that have made many teams rethink where approvals should actually live.
An approval workflow isn’t about more clicks. It’s a simple, policy-backed way to keep one clear path from receipt to decision and to keep the decision tied to the transaction.
Routing follows policy and spend limits instead of a CC list. The invoice, coding, comments, and final decision live on a single record that syncs to the ERP. Status updates in real time, reminders and escalations run on schedule, and exceptions resolve in context. When it’s time to pay, there’s no hunt for the “right” PDF or the missing “yes.” The answer is already attached to the work.
That’s why best-in-class teams beat the averages. They’re not moving faster because approvers are nicer. They’re moving faster because the work is visible, the next step is unambiguous, and the audit trail writes itself.
In steady state, a few changes stand out. Approvers see context before they decide, including line-level coding and match status, so they can approve with confidence instead of sending a clarifying email.
Queues don’t stall when someone is away because delegation lives in the workflow policy.
Aging gets managed instead of observed since everyone can see who’s holding work and for how long.
Suppliers ask fewer “did you get it” questions because they have a way to check status, which returns real hours to AP.
At audit time, the approval, timestamp, and version of record are already attached to the transaction, so the pack is complete by design.
When you look at all of that together, the story is less about technology and more about stability.
Working capital depends on timing, and timing depends on predictable approvals.
When sign-offs are consistent and visible, early-pay discounts go from aspirational to routine. Month-end close speed depends on clarity, and clarity depends on knowing what’s truly approved. Many teams still need over a week to close because of process bottlenecks and fragmented workflows; approvals stuck in email are one lever you can control right away.
Risk posture depends on where decisions live. Keeping approvals inside your system of record narrows exposure to business email compromise and aligns with the recordkeeping expectations regulators keep reinforcing.
Which brings us back to the original problem: email is built for conversation, not as the backbone of a critical approval process.
Email is fine for quick questions and simple updates. It is familiar, flexible, and always open on someone’s screen.
It is also a fragile place to run an approval process that touches cash flow, vendor relationships, and every month-end close. If you want faster cycles, fewer surprises, and less scramble at the end of the month, approvals need to live in a workflow that keeps the decision, the context, and the record in one place.
If you are thinking about risk as well as efficiency, our blog “The Friday Funnel: How Cybercriminals Target AP Teams When They’re Most Vulnerable” takes a closer look at how attackers use the same gaps created by scattered email processes and what AP teams can do to stay ahead of them. It is a practical next step for anyone rethinking how approvals should really work.